A POTENTIALITY (2020, digital, 16mm film, 16 minutes)
Winner of the Alice Guy Prize Special Mention at FID Marseille 2020. Notes from the Jury: A film which meticulously reflects upon the materiality of time following specific histories. While focusing on details, the images prevent us from accessing the whole. This gesture reflects the subject where voice has been violently stripped from the people, left silenced. The Special Mention for Prix Alice Guy goes to “A POTENTIALITY” by Dana Berman Duff.
A POTENTIALITY is a continuation of my interest in using film to shoot printed material, as in the Catalogue series. I'm especially interested in the equivalence of the film grain to the halftone print dot at the base level of the construction of reproduced image and language.
This piece is built on a graphic project by Susan Silton in which she reprinted five pages of the New York Times from the 1930s. Her project has a disturbing resemblance to present day newspaper reports.
Opera "The Emperor of Atlantis" composed in 1944 by Viktor Ulmann, libretto by Peter Kien.
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Dana Berman Duff lives and works in Los Angeles and Mexico. She was recognized as a Cultural Trailblazer by the L.A.Department of Cultural Affairs for 2020-21. Her artworks are included in several museum collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), the New Museum of Contemporary Art (NYC) and a number of private collections. She’s been awarded residencies at Foundation Kaus Australis in Rotterdam, and the American Academy in Rome. Her works in small format film and video have been selected for a number of international film festivals, including the Toronto Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Edinburgh Film Festival, ExIS Festival in Seoul, the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement in Geneva, Rencontres Internationales (Paris/Berlin), Dortmund/Cologne International Women’s Film Festival, and San Francisco Cinematheque’s Crossroads, among 40 others. A POTENTIALITY was awarded an Alice Guy Special Mention at the 2020 FIDMarseille Film Festival. A retrospective of her short films is scheduled in Los Angeles for spring 2022 at REDCAT.
Dana taught art and experimental film at several colleges and universities including NYU, Bennington, UCLA, Art Center Pasadena, and for many years at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles where she was founding director of Sculpture/New Genres.